Breaking bad habits for good health

Cue your brain to crave a healthy option insted of that bad one

Dessert after dinner. A cigarette at the bar. Checking Facebook every 10 minutes.

These are all habits — and these habits could be broken if you want them to be broken.

Every habit has three components: a cue, a routine and a reward, said Charles Duhigg, author of "The Power of Habit" (Random House; $10).

"The reward is how our brain learns how to latch on to the habit," Duhigg said, explaining that the reward is always something positive. Your brain tries to turn a repeatable pattern into a habit as long as it has a reward attached. So if you have a cup of coffee with a cookie, then your brain will use the coffee as a cue for a cookie. If you do this often enough (every other day for three weeks, for example), your brain will turn it into a repeatable pattern, and that pattern will become a habit.

Let's say that your habit is eating a candy bar every afternoon at the vending machine because you're in an afternoon slump.

The cue in this case is that you're tired, Duhigg said. The reward is the sugar in the candy.

Try breaking the habit by swapping out a different reward when you get that cue, he suggests.

"If you don't want to eat a candy bar, you can eat something else that contains sugar, like an apple," he said. But you probably crave coffee — not sugar — in this scenario.

"Once you figure out what the real reward is — feeling awake because you're tired — you can figure out an alternative."

Some habits are so engrained in our culture — dessert after dinner, for example, that it may feel like it's impossible to break them.

And if you're a fast eater, you may not feel full until you've eaten your dessert, said Gary Wenk, professor of psychology and neuroscience and molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics at The Ohio State University.

In cases like these, you're going to have to do a lifestyle change in order to break the habit.

"We all eat so fast that our brains do not discover that we're full until it receives information from three signals: the presence of food in the mouth, the extension of the stomach and the release of hormones from the intestines after food enters it from the stomach," Wenk said.

Your brain encourages you to continue eating until it gets a hormonal signal from your upper small intestine that it's ready to stop — which usually takes about 30-45 minutes after you've started eating. By then, you've usually started dessert.

"Therefore, the very best advice is simply to eat slower," he said.

The time it takes to break the habit will vary depending on the habit, Duhigg said.

"There's no magic number," he said. It all has to do with how engrained the behavior is and the efficacy of the new routine — which is why it can take some smokers years to quit, and why many dieters continue to bounce on and off their diets.

Stopping a bad habit before it starts is easier than breaking it, said Tara Gidus, registered dietitian and co-author of "Flat Belly Cookbook for Dummies" (John Wiley & Sons; $16).

"I always ask clients how they feel after that afternoon sugar rush of chocolate," Gidus said. "Do they spike their blood sugar and then feel sleepy? Is the guilt something they can live with?"

She suggests making two lists: how you want to feel, and how you actually feel when you eat too much or smoke or (insert bad habit). Then, figure out a better habit to replace the bad one so you have a plan in mind and don't fall into a bad habit.

"I think a lot of it is planning, as in having healthier substitutions, but it also has to do with plain old willpower and self-talk."